(And a quick update: congratulations to Luke, who will next fall be taking a new position as Professor of History at the University of Tennessee! He'll be focusing his teaching there on the Civil War/Reconstruction era. Way to go, Luke!).

As noted in yesterday's post about Charity Carney's work (done as Rable's Ph.D. student), it's all-Civil-War-all-the-time weekend for me as I go over midterm papers and exams from the class, so I thought I would post first about Charity's new book, and then Rable's. Below is a somewhat different version of what appeared (in shorter form) in the Journal of the Civil War Era last year, giving my extended thoughts on the work. By the way, James McPherson reviewed it in the New York Review of Books, if you want to get a rather more expert opinion. I do love the quote that the author dug up with which I begin the review; that one already has become a classroom staple.
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God’s
Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War.
By George C. Rable: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp.
586. Cloth, $35.00.

“I think as much of religion as any man,” a
Confederate soldier said while tippling some apple brandy, “but there’s such a
thing as having too damn much of it” (100). Religious faith was omnipresent in
the Civil War era, George Rable makes clear. At the same time, religious faith
provided no solution to the dilemmas of slavery leading up to the war, and it
probably lengthened and worsened the war once it came. There was, in that
sense, too much of it.

Too little of it, moreover (apart from Abraham Lincoln’s theological reflections), served as something other than consoler, rationalizer, and cheerleader. “Recognizing the hand of God in human history,” Rable concludes, “fostered neither humility nor even an appreciation for the majesty of inscrutable providence” 88). The result: “Divine purpose, national deliverance, personal salvation, and even millennial hope had all become entangled in a war that had become more destructive than even sinful human beings ever could have imagined” (277). This sober message dominates most of this careful, detailed, measured work.

“Rather than
the word becoming flesh,” Rable writes, “it seemed as if the flesh – of
northerners and southerners, of blacks and whites – had become words, an
endless stream of words” (22). Amidst this “flood” of religious rhetoric,
moreover, there was a “failure of moral imagination” (22). Unlike Abraham
Lincoln, who could put himself in the shoes of a slaveholder, most Americans
could not morally imagine themselves in the place of another; instead, religion
justified their own views and sacralized their distrusts and hatreds.

This failure extended to African American religious
moral imagination as well, Rable suggests, which “developed a language of freedom
yet could not point the way for the nation to escape the twin curses of slavery
and caste” (22). Here, I cannot agree. African American religious language did
point the way; it’s just that hardly any whites listened. And a relative
paucity of attention to that part of the story limits the reach of this
otherwise profound, deeply meditative work.

Rable takes an essentially Niebuhrian approach to
comprehending American religion during the Civil War. The frequently
millennial, apocalyptic voices of the era failed to “consider the limits of
human achievements or ambition, and even the “voices of moderation were not
that thoughtful, they were merely cautious” (196). Again and again through this
book, people figure out how and why God was on their side. Setbacks didn’t
matter in this theology, for these were “chastisements” to prepare God’s people
for greater things to come. Religious conviction thereby “produced a
providential narrative of the war,” and “created a fatalism grounded not in
deism but in providence.” This providential God also was a personal one. He was
“deeply invested in the fate of nations and individuals,” and faith in Him gave
the immense tragedy of the war “some higher and presumably nobler purpose” (9).
To the end of the war, and after, Americans persisted in understanding “their
lives and the war itself as part of an unfolding providential story.” This
helps to explain the longevity and ferocity of the conflict.

With this basic framework in mind, Rable surveys
religious interpretations of the conflict from secession to the “Good Friday”
of April 14, 1865. Along the way, he quotes myriad sources from all parts of society.
Evangelical Protestants dominate, as might be expected, but Catholic views of
the war are given extended treatment, and Jews and Mormons appear as well.

We learn, too, about religious life in the army
camps; exaggerated reports of revivals did not mislead many soldiers from
acknowledging that most of them were sinners rather than saints. Americans’
obsessions with what strike us as trivial pursuits of leisure – swearing,
card-playing, tippling, and the like – take up many pages, since these “sins” often
came to be seen as the reason God allowed for one chastisement or another of
his chosen people. In the work, soldiers contemplate the meaning of death, as
do the folks (usually women) back home; chaplains assume a “humble and
secondary” place (110); churches back home struggle to survive; congregations
in the border states engage in their own bitter civil wars; and the Reverends
on both sides interpret every up and down in the conflict according to what
they determined to be the will of Providence.

Rable’s deep research leads him away from very many
sweeping arguments or theses; the book proceeds instead slowly, patiently
accumulating stories and reflections from the actors of that period. This is
not Skip Stout’s “moral history of the Civil War,” in which self-righteous
rhetoric simply fueled killing. It is not the “American apocalypse” of Yankee
Protestants studied by James Moorehead, and it is not a story of Americans “baptized
in blood” as later Lost Cause mythology had it.

Further, as Rable shows, Christ
was in the camps, in both North and South, but He had to compete with cards,
prostitutes, alcohol, and bitter skepticism and irony increasingly evidenced
among many boys in blue and gray. Churchgoers at home placed great faith in the
virtue of their boys as pointing to success, while those boys quickly found out
that prayer and piety were connected only randomly with the outcome of any
particular battle. Confederates especially felt that. In the last two years of
the war, the more piety they evinced, the more battles they lost.

The weakness of this powerful work lies in fully
comprehending African American religious views as fundamental to the war. My
problem isn’t one of some question of affirmative action for historical voices.
Until relatively late in the conflict, this was a “war between the whites,” as Frederick
Douglass said. Rather, when Rable suggests that the failure of moral
imagination of Civil War-era Americans included African American Christians who
exalted freedom but “could not point the way for the nation to escape the twin
curses of slavery and caste,” I could only think of Garrison Frazier and his
black ministerial colleagues meeting with Generals Sherman and Howard in
January 1865, and outlining for them the meaning of freedom and the necessity
of property ownership to assist freedmen in escaping the curses of slavery and
caste; or to the multitude of voices documented in works such as Leon Litwack’s
Been in the Storm So Long.

Ultimately,
no matter what whites early in the conflict said, this was a war about the
meaning of freedom, and African Americans understood that to be a spiritual and
moral as well as an economic and political question. This story, I believe, is
fundamental and central to any religious history of the American Civil War.

Comments

It struck me as I read Rable and thought about Faust (and Stout) that there is a push toward a "consensus" history of the Civil War that largely minimizes African Americans in the war. If we take African American histories seriously, then death cannot be the main thrust of the war, slavery cannot be separated from the morality of war-making, and providential notions were racialized in many manners. Still lots of room in the wonderful world of Civil War studies!